The field of the invention relates generally to power plants, and more particularly, to systems and methods of modeling power plants.
Generally, known power plants include a number of major components. For example, known plants may include a gas turbine, a heat recovery steam generator, a steam turbine, and/or a condenser/cooling tower. To assess the performance of a power plant, the performance of each of the major components must be analyzed. For example, often power plants are assessed using modeling techniques. However, because the configuration and orientation of the major components used within a plant can vary from power plant to power plant, custom models for each power plant must be developed that take into account the specific configurations of the major components at each of the specific power plants being analyzed. As a result, developing plant specific models may be expensive and/or time-consuming.
To facilitate reducing costs as well as to provide a universal system, some known modeling systems have attempted to embed alternative configurations of some major components in a single model. However, such systems generally include a very complex model that often increases the time to solve the model, i.e., long convergence times.